MPEG-4 Audio Lossless Coding (ALS)

[ItsInTheCave]

I'm not going to go into a lenghty tirade about this so I'll keep it simple.

The MPEG-4 standard allows for lossless audio conversion so could this feature be added into MediaFork for better audio conversion. Playing lossy audio through high-quality speakers honestly doesn't sound great so this would at least fix this issue.

As far as I know this may only be possible with the .mp4 container but nevertheless it would be a nice feature to have.

If necessary a document describing the technical details of ALS can be found here; http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/forschung/p ... p4als.html

PS: I know this would be incompatible with the iPod but this will work with all specification compliant software/hardware.

PSS: If it is decided to not implement this because it might be incompatible with some Apple products then why not incorporate the Apple Lossless Encoder at the very least? This works with apple stuff (that I'm aware of). But I must stress the point, specification compliant lossless audio would be much better than proprietary Apple lossless.

[jbrjake]

The MPEG-4 standard allows for lossless audio conversion so could this feature be added into MediaFork for better audio conversion.

Um, is there even an ALS decoder out there? Last time I checked, the only person thinking about it was kostya:
http://codecs.multimedia.cx/?p=37

And a doom9 thread from last fall indicates that the only way to play ALS is in winamp, and winamp of course does not support ALS in an .mp4 container.

Even when there is, there will be no way to losslessly preserve DVD audio, as you're going to have to downmix the AC3 first...even if 6-channel sound is part of ALS (I think it is), I can only imagine a surround decoder for it is even further away than a stereo one.

PSS: If it is decided to not implement this because it might be incompatible with some Apple products then why not incorporate the Apple Lossless Encoder at the very least?

As you note, it's proprietary. So how, exactly, would we use it?

[deckeda]

I was under the impression AC3 was already lossy; i.e. not on par with PCM audio in bitrate. By the same token, would not file sizes balloon if the AC3 soundtrack could be replaced with ALS or some other lossless?

I understand two wrongs don't make a right and that converting to AAC or MP3 can't in any way help the sound, however.

[deckeda]

I just, while casually scrolling down, noticed something very familiar ... http://mediafork.dynalias.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=156

[ItsInTheCave]

I just, while casually scrolling down, noticed something very familiar ... http://mediafork.dynalias.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=156

Yes you did notice something familiar. I'm all for lossless encoding of videos. I've suggested a few methods but none of them have been loved by other members here. I'll watch and see if anyone else can suggest better methods of lossless preservation; in either audio or video.